Why Your Team Might Not Be Looking at the Right Numbers

Setting your team up for success is tougher than ever. One reason is that, at many companies, the individual players aren’t using the same playbook. As a result, they’re working at cross purposes like the runners in Monty Python’s “100 Meter Dash for People With No Sense of Direction.”

This split is compounded by multiple layers up and down the org chart: CMO, VPs and directors, each with a team of managers and specialists under them, executing tactics and managing spend for each channel. Every organization also has multiple agency and vendor relationships.

If your organization sets individual goals and incentives by silo, you may be hurting performance.

That’s a lot of people in the pool. This complex structure often leads to teams working toward independent key performance indicators (KPIs) and incentives, leading to fragmented, ineffective optimization—by channel instead of across channels.

Aligning Metrics to a Common Goal

When goals, metrics and incentives align, teams can work together to boost performance and enhance the consumer experience along the entire funnel. But when they don’t, channel managers may unknowingly be working at odds.

Assuming that every part of the organization is doing all they can to feed the funnel and drive results is no longer enough. If your organization sets individuals’ goals and incentives by silo, you may be hurting rather than helping performance.

That’s because each silo has its own metrics. Your paid search manager is optimizing keyword performance while the demand generation lead is tracking asset downloads and newsletter subscriptions. How can you be sure they’re looking at the right numbers to achieve company goals?

No matter which goal you’re focused on, you have to make sure your metrics align so that you’re tracking the right indicators. From a marketing perspective, this is critical. Marketing teams and management need to align on objectives and the KPIs that track progress toward achieving them.

New Measurement for All Channels

To be effective, marketing organizations and their agency partners must rely on a data source that offers a holistic picture of performance and makes it possible for everyone to work toward shared goals. At the same time, each team member has different needs for actionable marketing intelligence at a different cadence.

Multi-touch attribution is an approach that makes sure all members of the organization are working together. Multi-touch attribution integrates disparate marketing performance data to establish a single source of truth.

By collecting, consolidating and normalizing performance data into common measures and taxonomy, this methodology supplies the insights you need on a consistent, holistic basis.

Five Use Cases for Multi-Touch Attribution

It’s budget planning time. The CMO of a large retailer needs to justify current marketing spend to other C-suite leaders, and decide how to allocate budget and coordinate messages and experiences across online and offline channels.

Because they use multi-touch attribution, s/he knows VPs of marketing and media can report on which channels are driving business objectives for each target audience. The CMO uses that information to reallocate budgets to achieve higher top-line growth and better bottom-line efficiency.

VP: Cross-Channel Interaction

It’s the end of the second quarter. Last quarter, the brand launched a new multi-channel campaign to drive sales of a new product, but the campaign fell short of its performance goals. The VP needs to know how to best allocate spend in order to increase sales by 20% in the third quarter.

Since a business rival is launching a competing product, she knows the marketing messages need to resonate with target customers and compel them to take action. She asks the managers of paid search, display, email and their e-commerce site to use multi-touch attribution to report on cross-channel interactions before deciding how to best allocate her quarterly budget to reach third-quarter targets.

Channel Manager: Email

It’s Monday and there are campaigns rolling out on Tuesday and Thursday to different audience segments. The email channel manager needs to boost click-through rates to meet the weekly KPI.

Using multi-touch attribution, he checks the response to last week’s campaigns and sets up A/B tests for the emails going out this week, tweaking creatives for each audience segment to see which raises click-through rates (CTRs). He then optimizes the email by segment and pushes those out to generate a higher return.

Channel Manager: SEM

At the agency, the SEM channel manager sees via multi-touch attribution that the effectiveness of her tier 1 campaign has suddenly dropped off because a new competitor has started aggressively bidding on the same keywords with an enticing offer that’s stealing click share.

She directs the SEM Specialist to increase max bids by 10% and asks for an update on impact to performance in 24 hours. In the meantime, she asks the media analyst to report on which ads in the rotation are driving conversions at the highest rate for that campaign so she can direct her SEM Specialist to pause the weaker performing ads.

Media Analyst: Dimension Analysis

At the agency, the media analyst pulls the numbers gathered via multi-touch attribution from yesterday’s mobile app, digital video, display and paid search ads. He compares creatives, ad sizes, offers, devices, geography, and publishers to see which ones are performing well. He notices that last night’s new creative is working well across publishers, but only in the bigger size. He alerts the media buyer to boost ad size across channels.

Working Together

Digital innovation has created a new set of opportunities and challenges for marketers. To be effective, every member of your team and your agency needs a holistic picture of performance.

Multi-touch attribution allows brands in all industries to tackle the daunting task of properly measuring and optimizing the results of their marketing efforts and makes it possible for your organization to work together toward shared goals.